


Dark Side of the Moon

by ant5b



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Post-The Golden Spear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 10:25:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18798478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ant5b/pseuds/ant5b
Summary: Donald never thought he'd be showing an alien pictures of his nephews.





	Dark Side of the Moon

“So you’re the brother.”

“Whose brother?”

The purple alien glares at him from across the bars. 

Donald almost smiles. Instead, he pops the gum he found in the Spear’s cockpit that inexplicably keeps him alive. It’s even black licorice flavor, his favorite. 

And sure, a part of him wants to be difficult—this alien’s the one who shot him in the arm after all, as he stumbled out of the rocket and onto the moon’s surface confused and terrified and alone. She’s the one who dragged him down into this cold, empty cell. But a bigger part of him wants to hear someone else say his sister’s name, after nearly ten years of grief prevented him from saying it himself. He found her ship, but that’s not proof of life, and he needs to know that she was  _ here. _ That she’s  _ alive. _ That she made it home. 

The alien, who offers no name and he doesn’t ask for one, rolls her eyes. “That insufferable Earther, Della Duck,” she replies, like it’s nothing, like it’s not a miracle to hear his sister’s name on a stranger’s lips. 

Donald’s hand slips where he’s bandaging his scorched arm with the torn sleeve of his shirt. His mind swims, momentarily overwhelmed with relief so intense it verges on pain, drowning out the sting of his burns. It fills his chest, pressing on his lungs and his heart until he’s forced to hunch over to alleviate the tension. 

That cruise sounds pretty good right about now. 

There’s a rushing sound in his ears and Donald has experienced enough panic attacks to recognize what’s happening now. It paralyzes him on the floor of his cell, his alien captors not even deigning to provide him with a bench, and leaves him blind and deaf to his surroundings for a series of heartbeats that that seem to span years. 

_ Della,  _ each heartbeat reminds him.  _ On Earth.  _

_ My boys. On Earth. _

_ Uncle Scrooge. On Earth.   _

A voice breaks through the haze of his mind, punctuated by a too-tight grip on his uninjured shoulder. 

“—not allowed to die, you hear me, Della’s brother? If you die I’ll kill you myself.”

Donald lifts his head with great difficulty, his mind buzzing. 

The alien is in front of him now, kneeling on the other side of the bars. Her expression is furrowed in a tremendous scowl, but even amidst the clutter of his panicked mind he knows he isn’t imagining the glimmer of true concern in her strangely colored eyes. 

Donald tries to choke down a hysterical laugh, and judging by the strange look she sends him he isn’t entirely successful. “Of course Della would make friends with the mean, triggerhappy alien.”

She somehow manages to scowl harder. “We’re not friends.”

He huffs a laugh, pressing a hand against the ache in his chest that his panic attacks always bring on. Phantom pain from an injury nearly fifteen years ago; he doesn’t even remember what caused it. 

Donald realizes that the alien hasn’t removed her hand from his shoulder when she squeezes again, with enough force to bruise. She’s righting him from where he began to tip over, too lost in his own head to realize he’s slumping to one side. 

Tentatively, Donald reaches up to brush his fingers against the alien’s hand. “I’m not gonna die,” he tells her. He has no idea if it’s the truth. The tall blue alien in the gold cape had pinned him with a look as he was dragged away, hungry and forbiddingly eager, as the dozens of aliens surrounding him called for Donald’s head. 

The purple alien scoffs, immediately letting go. The lack of support has him slumping forward slightly before he finds the wherewithal to right himself. 

“Whatever. If you’re anything like Della, you’re too stubborn to die anyway.”

For the first time since he found the Spear of Selene in the woods, Donald feels like he can breathe again. “What…” he breaks off, desperate to ask and terrified of doing so. “What’s she like? D-Della?” 

Her name burns from the inside out, paired with the acrid despair of a stranger likely knowing his twin better than he does. 

The purple alien crosses her arms, apparently making herself comfortable on the floor. “She’s a pain,” she answers, and Donald does laugh then. “Always humming that stupid song, and cheerful enough to make me sick. She wouldn’t stop  _ talking— _ about her kids, her adventures with her family. It got to be pretty insufferable.”

“How long...how long was she here?” Donald has to swallow around a stone in his throat, because he can see his sister in his mind’s eye so clearly, more so than he has in a decade because he’s no longer picturing a ghost. 

The alien looks away at that. “Ten orbital periods in the Wastes,” she answers, her tone colorless. “She was only in Tranquility for a quarter of one.”

The measurements are alien (haha) to him, but he can guess what the she means. And the picture she paints is a bleak one because Donald realizes its implications. Della has been alone for a long, long time. 

“She kept a photograph of you,” the alien says, and the breath leaves Donald’s body in a rush. She looks curious, her head cocked to the side and brow slightly furrowed. It makes her look younger, for all that she’s double his height and ten times his muscle mass. “You, her Uncle Scrog, and her...kids?” The alien makes a face. “Della said you hatch from eggs,” she says, like she’s hoping it isn’t true and Donald will set her straight. 

He almost starts laughing again, but he knows that if he starts now he won’t stop until he starts crying. 

Donald  knows what picture she’s talking about. Of course he knows. Scrooge (or  _ Scrog, _ but he’ll have to laugh about it later, when he can wrap his uncle in a hug with one hand, his sister with the other, and his kids in between) has his copy framed, and gave it to the boys after the Shadow War incident. Donald’s is in a shoebox shoved into the back of his closet, because looking at their young, smiling faces always leaves him awash in hate and grief. 

“Yeah, ducks hatch from eggs,” he replies, and he almost does laugh at the disgusted expression on the alien’s face. 

She glances down, tapping at her knee with one of her three large fingers. “Her sons,” she starts, expression pensive. “Are they...well? Della said she didn’t even know what they looked like.”

Misery threatens to overwhelm him once more, because will  _ he  _ ever see his kids again? Will he ever see the bright, inquisitive light in Huey’s eyes, Louie’s sly smile, be victim to  Dewey’s boundless enthusiasm or Webby’s bone-crushing hugs? 

But he stays afloat through practice and force of will, stuffing his panic deep down in his chest. 

“I can show you,” Donald says. He points through the bars to a table off to the side, where all his worldly possessions sit, confiscated by the alien in front of him. They consist of his cell phone, wallet, and a stamp card to Vacation Van Honk’s Sandwich Emporium. “My, uh, my phone. It’s a rectangle looking thing, for-for storing pictures.”

The alien glares at him, as fierce as she’s ever been. 

Donald wonders if he’s made a misstep. Maybe he was wrong in striking up conversation with his captor, who, for someone that shot him, isn’t actually that bad. 

She stands up in one smooth, dangerous movement, startling Donald so badly he jerks away from the bars. The alien scrutinizes him with a by now familiar scowl, and he finds himself unable to do anything but meet her gaze. 

Finally she scoffs, and stalks off toward the table. 

“This thing?” she asks, picking his phone up with the tips of two fingers, like its diseased. 

Donald lets out a breath, relief loosening his stress-tense muscles. “Yeah. Yeah that’s it.”

“How do I know this isn’t some sort of weapon?” she demands. She starts walking back over to him, despite her accusation. 

“You can turn in on if you want,” he offers. 

She rolls her eyes. “And let you use it against me? Nice try.” She tosses the phone through the bars and sits back down. 

Of course Donald doesn’t manage to catch it, and it clatters against the stone floor of his cell. But that’s okay, he bought a lifeproof case for a reason. It’s also fireproof and warded against hexes, but that’s neither here nor there. 

He turns his phone on, and almost wants to laugh at the lack of any bars. Maybe if he let Gyro install that signal amplifying update he’d been insisting on, he’d be able to just call his family and let know where he was. That, or the phone would explode the moment he turned it on, but at this point Donald would probably accept the risk. 

Not wanting the alien to get suspicious, he quickly goes to his photos. He scrolls through them for a moment, debating what picture to show her. It’s not that any of them are bad, to the contrary, each and every one causes his heart to clench. But there’s one photo in particular he wants to show her. 

“Here,” Donald says, turning the phone around so she can see the screen. He’s pulled up a photo they took at Christmas, just him and the boys in gaudy sweaters and hats. “These are my _ — _ I-I mean, Della’s kids,” he stumbles, and it has to be the worst time for him to be coming to this realization, so of course that’s what he’s doing. 

Donald’s face burns in embarrassment and shame, because of course Della’s back where she belongs, with her sons and their uncle. The boys have their mother back, the person they’ve been missing all this time, and who Donald could never compete with. And he’s so, so happy that she’s home, that she can live out the life she’s always deserved. He just hopes that they don’t forget about him. 

The alien is looking at him again, expression odd and inscrutable, and Donald presses on with a pasted-on smile. “This is Huey,” he says, pointing to each nephew in turn. “That’s Dewey, and this is Louie. They’re triplets.”

She leans forward, eyes narrowed as she pores over the photograph like there’s some hidden meaning to unlock. “Della didn’t mention names,” she finally says, cooly lifting her gaze. 

Donald blinks. “Uh, no, we didn’t have anything concrete picked out when she...when she left.”

“You gave them their names?” she asks. 

“Yeah,” Donald replies, not sure what else to say. “I-I raised them.”

“Hm.” She makes a small considering sound, glancing over the picture again. “Show me more,” she orders. 

Gushing over his boys is something Donald can always do, even if they aren’t going to be his boys for much longer. He pulls up other pictures, showing them to the alien one by one. “Well, here’s Huey at his latest Junior Woodchuck award ceremony, where he earned five new badges. And Louie’s first lemonade stand—he gave away free chips he’d dumped salt on, and sold the lemonade for five bucks a glass. Oh, and here’s Dewey jumping off the pool’s high dive, he almost gave me a heart attack.”

Donald finds himself relaxing, bit by bit, as he opens up to this alien. The ache of his burns diminishes, as does the all-consuming terror of realizing he’s stranded on the moon. And the alien seems genuinely interested in the photos he shows her, for all that she wields indifference like a shield. He wonders at her and Della’s relationship, at how much she clearly cares for his sister. 

He ends up on a picture of all four kids on Webby’s birthday. It was taken just as they shoved her face in the cake, as she’d been warned they would do, and seconds before she launched the most strategic foodfight in history against them, as she’d warned  _ them  _ she would do. 

The alien reaches forward for the first time in several minutes, and points to each of his nephews in turn. “Huey,” she says, correctly, “Dewey, and Louie.” Startled, he watches as she then points to him. 

It takes him a moment to understand what she wants. “Oh—me? Donald. Donald Duck.”

She nods shortly. Then she stands back up, towering over him. “Lieutenant Penumbra,” she says, briefly laying her fist across her chest. “You’re going to be here for a while, Donald Duck. Likely even permanently. You know that, don’t you?”

His answering smile is brittle. “I figured something like that, yeah.”

Penumbra nods again, glancing off to the side. Her words are clipped and brisk. “I have other duties to attend to. Another guard will be here shortly. And...I’m sorry I shot you.”

The last statement startles him. “I..It’s okay,” Donald says, and he supposes it is. 

Penumbra moves as if to turn away, but she lingers for a moment longer. Her expression is pensive. “You don't find it strangely...unlucky that you would end up stranded on the same planet your sister just left?” 

Oh, if only she knew. 

“Yeah,” Donald responds dryly, thirty-five years of the worst luck imaginable guffawing in his ears. “But the moon isn’t a planet.”

Penumbra’s face screws up in the most impressive scowl to date. “You’re as bad as she is.” 


End file.
